Why the GOP’s popular-vote edge hasn’t translated to more House seats

For many years, the manner in which our country elects its leaders has been a very favorable setup for Republicans. Not only did they win the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections despite getting fewer votes, but they also held the House in 1996 and 2012 despite getting fewer votes. Republicans have regularly won more House seats than their popular vote share would suggest — in large part thanks to their superior control of redistricting.

The 2022 election, though, looks like it will buck that trend.

Republicans appear primed to win the narrowest of House majorities — around 220-215 or 219-216 — despite possibly winning a majority of the votes nationwide and edging Democrats by around three or four percentage points.

If they do ultimately win by around three or four points, it would mean Republicans improved on their margin from the 2020 election by around six or seven points, but they were only able to add about 2 percent of seats.

The first thing to note is that we have incomplete results. The Cook Political Report’s national popular vote tracker currently shows Republicans winning 51.5 percent of House votes to the Democrats’ 47 percent — a gap of 4.5 points.

The second point is that the popular vote can be deceiving. That’s especially the case in the battle for the Senate, but it’s also true of the House.

The reason: Some districts don’t feature two major-party candidates, and as a result, those races skew the overall numbers.

it could be a statistical fluke — just Democrats happening to do better than would be expected in the most competitive races. Another possibility: the lackluster GOP candidates in a number of important races, who might have held the party back from making gains more commensurate with their overall edge in the popular vote (i.e., shrinking a likely gain of around 20 seats to one that’s fewer than 10). That would be in line with what happened in the Senate, where Republicans left winnable races (and in that chamber, the majority) on the table by running flawed candidates.

But it’s also worth emphasizing that the gap between the votes Democrats got and the seats they’ll control isn’t wildly out of step with the historical norm. Even in the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, Democrats won more seats than their popular vote share suggested.

Princeton University’s Sam Wang plotted elections dating back 1946 and found that a two-to-four-point Democratic loss on the popular vote would leave the 2022 race in line with what we would expect from the ultimate balance of power:

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